The usual Left-liberal critique of the
European Union is that it’s basically okay, just with a ‘democracy deficit.’
Sometimes faces
become symbols of the anonymous forces behind them. Was not the stupidly
smiling face of Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem the symbol of the
European Union’s brutal pressure on Greece? Recently, the Transatlantic Trade
& Investment Partnership (TTIP)—the European cousin of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership—acquired a new symbol: the cold face of E.U. trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström, who responded to
massive public opposition to TTIP
this way: “I do not take my mandate from the European people.”
Now a third such
symbol has emerged: Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the European
Commission, who, on Dec. 23, 2015, scolded the Polish government for adopting a
new law that subordinates Poland’s constitutional court to the authority of
government. Timmermans also condemned the law that allows the
Polish parliament to replace all executives at the country’s public television
and radio companies. In an immediate rebuke, Polish nationalists warned Brussels “to exercise more
restraint in instructing and cautioning the parliament and the government of a
sovereign and democratic state.”
From the standard
left-liberal view, it is inappropriate to put these three names into the same
series: Dijsselbloem and Malmström personify the pressure of the Brussels
bureaucrats (without democratic legitimization) on democratically elected
governments, while Timmermans intervened to protect basic democratic
institutions (judicial independence and a free press). It may appear obscene to
compare the brutal neoliberal pressure on Greece with the justified criticism
of Poland, but did the Polish government’s reaction not hit the mark?
Timmermans did indeed pressure a democratically elected government of a
sovereign state.
Recently, when I was
answering questions from the readers of Süddeutsche Zeitung about the
refugee crisis, the question that attracted the most attention concerned
democracy—but with a right-wing populist twist. When Angela Merkel famously
invited hundreds of thousands of refugees into Germany, what gave her the
right? My point here is not to support anti-immigrant populists, but to point out
the limits of democratic legitimization. The same goes for those who advocate
the radical opening of the borders: Are they aware that, since our democracies
are nation-state democracies, their demand equals a suspension of democracy—in
other words, that a gigantic change should be allowed without democratic
consultation?
We encounter here
the old dilemma: What happens to democracy if the majority is inclined to vote
for racist and sexist laws? It’s easy to imagine a democratized Europe with a
much more engaged citizenry in which the majority of governments are formed by
anti-immigrant populist parties. I am not afraid to conclude that emancipatory
politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic procedures of
legitimization.
Of course, no
privileged political agent knows inherently what is best for the people and has
the right to impose its decisions on the people against their will (as the
Stalinist Communist Party did). However, when the will of the majoity clearly
violates basic emancipatory freedoms, one has not only the right but also the
duty to oppose that majority. This is not reason to despise democratic
elections—only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth. As a
rule, elections reflect the conventional wisdom determined by the hegemonic
ideology.
Left critics of the
European Union thus find themselves in a predicament: They deplore the
“democracy deficit” of the European Union and propose plans to make the
decision making in Brussels more transparent, but they support the
“non-democratic” Brussels administrators when they exert pressure on
democratically legitimized “fascist” tendencies. What lies behind this
contradiction is the Big Bad Wolf of the European liberal Left: the threat of a
new Fascism embodied in anti-immigrant right-wing populism. This strawman is
perceived as the principal enemy against which we should all unite, from
(whatever remains of) the radical Left to mainstream liberal democrats
(including E.U. administrators like Timmermans). Europe is portrayed as a
continent regressing toward a new Fascism that feeds on the paranoiac hatred
and fear of the external ethnic-religious enemy (mostly Muslims). While this
new fascism is dominant in some post-Communist East European countries
(Hungary, Poland, etc.), it is getting stronger in many other E.U. countries
where the view is that the Muslim refugee invasion poses a threat to European
civilization.
But is this really
fascism? The term is all too often used to avoid detailed analysis. The Dutch
politician Pim Fortuyn, killed in early May 2002, two weeks before he was
expected to gain one-fifth of the vote, was a paradoxical figure: a right-wing
populist whose personal attributes and opinions (for the most part) were almost
perfectly “politically correct”: He was gay, had good personal relations with
many immigrants and possessed an innate sense of irony, etc.—in short, he was a
good, tolerant liberal with regard to everything except his basic political
stance. He opposed fundamentalist immigrants because of their lack of tolerance
toward homosexuality, women’s rights, religious differences, etc. What he
embodied was thus the intersection between rightist populism and liberal
political correctness. Perhaps he had to die because he was living proof that
the dichotomy between right-wing populism and liberal tolerance is a false
one—that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin.
Many leftist
liberals, like Jürgen Habermas, idealize a “democratic” European Union that
never existed. Recent E.U. policy is nothing more than a desperate attempt to
make Europe fit for global capitalism. The usual Left-liberal critique of the
European Union—it’s basically okay, just with a “democracy deficit”—betrays the
same naïveté as those critics of former-Communist countries who supported the
Communists but bemoaned the lack of democracy. In both cases, the democracy
deficit is a necessary part of the structure.
In a reference to
the likely election of Syriza in Greece, in December 2014, the Financial
Times published a column headlined: “Eurozone’s weakest link is the
voters.” In the Pink Lady’s ideal world, Europe gets rid of this “weakest link”
and experts gain the power to directly impose economic measures. If elections
take place, their function is to confirm the consensus of experts.
As Eurocrat and
former prime minister of Italy Mario Monti put it: “Those who govern must not
allow themselves to be completely bound by parliamentarians.”
The only way to
counteract the “democratic deficit” of global capitalism would be through some
transnational entity. But the nation-state cannot serve as a democratic bulwark
against global capitalism for two reasons: First, it is a priori in a weak
position at a time when the economy functions as a global force; second, to do
so, a sovereign nation-state is obliged to mobilize nationalist ideology and
thus opens itself up to rightist populism. Poland and Hungary are today two
such nationstates opposing globalization.
This brings us to
what is the principal contradiction of global capitalism: Imposing a global
political order that would correspond to a global capitalist economy is
structurally impossible, and not because it is empirically difficult to
organize global elections or to establish global institutions. The reason is
that the global market is not a neutral, universal machine with the same rules
for everybody. It requires a vast network of exceptions, violations of its own
rules, extra-economic (military) interventions and so forth. So while our
economy is more and more global, what is “repressed” from the anonymous global
economy returns in politics: archaic fixations and particular (ethnic,
religious, cultural) identities. This tension defines our predicament today:
The global, free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing social divisions.
Commodities circulate more and more freely, but people are kept apart by new
walls, from physical walls (such as in the West Bank and between the United
States and Mexico) to reasserted ethnic and religious identities.
Does this mean that
we should bypass the topic of democratizing Europe as a blind alley? On the
contrary, it means that, precisely because of its central significance, we
should approach it in a more radical way.
The problem is more
substantial: How do we transform the basic coordinates of our social life, from
our economy to our culture, so that democracy as free, collective
decision-making becomes actual—not just a ritual of legitimizing decisions made
elsewhere?
No comments:
Post a Comment